Junior League of Calgary Sustainer Bobbie Sparrow parlayed her experiences in business, philanthropy, and volunteer service into a career in politics, ultimately rising to office in the Canadian Parliament’s House of Commons.
 
“I’m a black and white person,” says Bobbie Sparrow, the spunky 76-year-old who is now an active Sustainer in the Junior League of Calgary, which she joined in 1961 after moving to town from Toronto with her husband. “I’m really honest.”
The simplicity of this self-assessment seems just a tad misleading for the mother of four who was widowed at …

Webinar Wednesdays gets into gear, Wednesday, Oct. 5, with insights from Heather McLeod Grant, co-author of Forces for Good
The Webinar Wednesdays program, one of the exciting offerings in AJLI’s robust new membership-wide online learning initiative, gets into gear Wednesday, October 5, with a featured presentation by Heather McLeod Grant, senior consultant at the Monitor Institute and co-author of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits.
Grant, who possess an in-depth knowledge of the AJLI organization and membership as a result of having helped guide the organization through its Strategic …

Just ask Olivia Thomas.
Corporate finance executive, single mother, legislative insider, and life-long volunteer, Olivia Thomas has played a variety of impactful roles. Now serving as the executive director of Safe Place and Rape Crisis Center (SPARCC) in Florida’s Sarasota and DeSoto Counties, Thomas attributes her ability to toggle among multiple identities to a single skill set she acquired courtesy of the Junior League of Sarasota where she has volunteered for more than 17 years, ultimately serving as president from 2006 to 2007: civic leadership development and training.
“It was actually …

Cornelia Fort was an unlikely candidate to be the first American woman to die on active military duty. Born into a wealthy family in Nashville, the oldest of five children. A debutante. Sarah Lawrence graduate. Member of the Junior League of Nashville. Destined for a quiet life.

But Cornelia Fort wanted to fly, and fly she did. She took her first flying lesson in 1940, shortly after her father died. She soon became first female flight instructor in Nashville.